"What is good enough for them is good enough for us," he decided. "But is there no more to see? I thought the building ran around by the water."
"There is no connection," she replied. "The building over the water is just a storehouse. We are a great tribe, and Beran has agents everywhere. Never a day goes by that plunder does not come in, and we store it until there is opportunity to dispose of it."
"He is a master thief," agreed Nikka. "So we had heard. But where do you live, maiden?"
Her face glowed rosily with satisfaction at this first evidence of his interest in herself.
"Across the court," she answered. "Come and you shall see."
We descended the stairs into the big hall on the ground-floor, where the three hags had crouched again before the fire, and crossed the courtyard to the building opposite on the right of the entrance. It was long and graceful in appearance, beautifully built of a hard white marble, which had been coated with dirt for centuries. The cornices were elaborately sculptured in a conventional design; the window openings were carved and set with a light mastery that disguised their bulk.
The door was supported by simple pillars of wonderful green stone that contrived to show its color through the accumulation of filth which tried to mask it. How such pillars could have escaped the antiquary I do not know. They were as handsome as anything in St. Sophia. But then, as we were to discover, the whole abode of Beran Tokalji constituted an amazing shrine of Byzantine art, perhaps the most remarkable non-ecclesiastical remnant in the city.
But of all this I thought little at the time. What interested me more than anything was that immediately above the door on a panel let into the wall was carved a representation of a bull, head lowered and in act to charge. I looked at Nikka, and his eyes met mine with a warning glance to say nothing. It was a good thing that my knowledge of Gypsy dialect was sketchy, for had I been able to, I believe I should have exclaimed over this first clue and attempted to probe our guide's knowledge of it.
Kara never gave the sculpture a glance; it meant nothing to her. She beckoned us inside the door. Here again was a spacious, pillared hall, triple-aisled like a small church, its battered pavement showing traces here and there of the gorgeous mosaics which once had floored it. Whatever decorations adorned its walls were obscured by the incrustations of centuries of misuse. The pillars were of different stones, many of them semi-precious, and occasionally glinting pink or red or green or yellow through their drab coats of dirt and soot. At one end was an apse-like space large enough to hold a dinner table or a throne, and on the curving wall I fancied I could discern faint traces of one of those mosaic portraits with which the Byzantine artists loved to adorn their buildings.
But this superb chamber was littered with the odds and ends of a people accustomed to dwell in tents. I suppose Tokalji's tribe, by all accounts we had, had been living here for some hundreds of years, yet they never adapted themselves to urban conditions. Generation after generation looked upon this wonderful fragment of one of the world's stateliest palaces as no more than the four walls and a roof required to keep out rain and cold. The windows were covered by wooden shutters. Cleaning was resorted to only when the atmosphere became unsupportable for the salted nostrils of the tribe.